


When Dead Is Not Dead: Series 7 And The Stakes

by PlaidAdder



Series: Doctor Who Meta [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Steven Moffat Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 23:11:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nonfiction. </p><p>In which I talk about why it is a problem that death in Moffat's Whoniverse is almost never permanent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Dead Is Not Dead: Series 7 And The Stakes

Through donna-remembers I discovered this post (["Searching For a Dramatic Moment"](http://whovianfeminism.tumblr.com/post/41900588165/searching-for-a-dramatic-moment)), which uses the image of the Doctor carrying the unconscious companion to ask the question: Why is Season 7 so boring? Where are the feels?

Yes. Season 7. I struggle with it. I struggled with Season 6 and Season 5; but not this much. And here is how far I’ve got with understanding what went wrong on the emotional stakes front during the Moffat Era: A universe in which death is not real and nothing is permanent just cannot be emotionally compelling to us. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s a problem that Moffat doesn’t believe in rules.

All through season 5-7 the show keeps straining to raise the emotional stakes—which itself produces a kind of emotional fatigue. But it doesn’t work, and that’s because the end of Season 5 establishes that there are no rules operating in the Who universe. Not only can anything be done, anything can be undone. So by Season 7, when you see someone apparently in mortal danger or apparently dying or apparently dead, why should you care? Odds are that person will be alive again next episode, or we’ll find out it wasn’t really him/her, or that the apparent danger was not real.

The knowledge and dread of death is at the bottom of a lot of our emotional responses. A permanent separation (such as happens with Rose at the end of Season 2 or in a different way with Donna at the end of season 4) is painful in part because it reminds us of the great tragedy of being human and mortal: that nothing is permanent, and that not only will you die, but so will everyone you love. Our knowledge that our mortal and vulnerable bodies can be permanently harmed or killed at any time is what makes watching characters in peril exciting to us.

By the end of Season 5 we know that in Moffat’s brave new Whoniverse, dead is not dead. Amy’s dead at the end of “The Pandorica Opens.” She’s alive at the beginning of “The Big Bang.” Rory’s existence is erased, from everywhere but the Doctor’s memory, by his contact with the Killer Time Crack…and then he is ‘remembered’ back to existence in “The Pandorica Opens.” The entire universe is actually destroyed in “The Pandorica Opens.” It returns in “The Big Bang.” Again, the explanation (I’ll just fly the magic box into the exploding other magic box and it will all be fine, don’t you worry) is bullshit. 

When dead is not dead, you’ve got MAJOR problems in terms of getting an emotional response out of your audience. On some level, for us, death is what’s always at stake. No death, no stakes. No stakes, no feels.

In Season 6 this gets worse because we lose something that was a very important control on the Doctor’s otherwise magical ability to go anywhere and do anything and solve any problem: the Fixed Point in Time. If the Doctor can ‘trick’ a Fixed Point in Time, as he does at the end of Season Six, well, that’s another major problem for the stakes. “The Fires of Pompeii” is as wrenching as it is because it’s a Fixed Point and it can’t _not_ happen, no matter how badly Donna doesn’t want it to. Having the Doctor occasionally run up against something that he *cannot* change is one way of keeping him real; and it’s one of the things that protects our emotional investment in him. It’s also what creates the kind of tragic emotions produced at the end of, say, Season 2, where the Doctor loses Rose, as he believes, forever; or the whole angst over the destruction of Gallifrey, which both Nine and Ten believe to be, if not a fixed point exactly, then something that can never change. 

Again: if the Fixed Point—the thing that you can’t change, the thing that compels you to take actions you abhor and suffer consequences you can barely stand and make sacrifices that may well kill you (for good), is gone, there go the feels. The best illustration of this is probably the game-changing moment in “Day of the Doctor” when Eleven whips out the sonic, pushes the button back down, and says, “I’ve changed my mind.” Bang goes the time war. We get a happy ending, hooray. We also lose about 90% of Nine and Ten’s darkest emotions.

Anyway. Under Moffat, you can have all the happy endings you want. The price is the lowering of the stakes. Some find it a good bargain. I personally don’t. 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before I'd seen all of Series 7. But it only gets worse. Clara dies and comes back not once, not twice, but three times; Jenny dies and comes back to life; Strax gets wished into the cornfield and then reappears.


End file.
